PostgreSQL, Second Edition

Client 3—Query Processing

To execute a SQL command with Python's DB-API, you must first create a cursor. Don't confuse this cursor with a cursor created by PostgreSQL's DECLARE CURSOR command; they have some similarities, but they are certainly not the same thing, as you will see in this section.

You create a cursor object by calling a connection's cursor() function^[1]. For example, if you have a connection named connect, you would create a cursor like this:

^[1] It is possible, but extremely unlikely, that a call to connect.cursor() can throw a pgOperationalError exception. In fact, the only way that can happen is if somebody is messing around with the internals of a connection object; and we would never do that, would we?

 cur = connect.cursor() ...